ECHOES
OF MIGRANTS' MYTH
F
IRST
our tribal leaders. We listed ten names, so we just needed their tribes. Facebook proved to be the best research field for our necessities, indeed it affords users to create thematic pages and to express their cultural habits in different ways: writing text, publishing images and sharing likes.
At this point we were about to move the first main step of our research. Were the tribes actually divided?
What we found out was astonishing.
First we scraped the web. We was trying to confirm an hypothesis, according to which Italian public opinion about migrants was divided in tribes. And each tribe would have shared particular mental images regarding migration; quite like a tribal mythology.
We started analyzing Google’s most indexed web sites regarding the topic and we found out that they were mainly online newspapers; so we tried to discover who talks the most about migration in newspapers,
Online Newspapers
researches
researches
Data Scraping Tools
researches
T
HEN
SOME
MAPPING
A network of Facebook likes was the first strong sign of the cultural distance between tribal chiefs. In fact, Facebook Like networks were either isolated between them or extremely interconnected, generating one sole network. Then we searched deeper in Facebook, scraping all data we could find about each tribal leader page activity in 2016. We wanted to depict tribes’ mental images of migrants; so we analyzed their communicative habits when speaking about that topic. Each tribe uses a strongly different language, and connect the topic with deeply different imageries. Someone spoke about helping migrants, someother refers to them as rapists.
1
Each Pin
stands for
a Facebook
page of
isolated like
networks
2
Some tribe
talk much
more than
others about
migrants
3
And each
tribe shares
a particular
vocabulary
regarding
this issue
L
ASTLY
AN
INSIGHT
A phenomenon known as
Echo Chamber effect
In culturally closed ambients, stereotypes easily radicalize. The same ideas are repeated as echoes, growing louder and louder; they feed and sustain themselves becoming a credo.
The button below will send you to our YouTube channel to try echo chamber data experience, we suggest to use Google Chrome and if possible to use a VR viewer with headphones. You will listen real Facebook comments of the followers of three influencers pages. The volume of the echo stands for the comments’ tendency to be wrathful; the read comments are more overlapped, the more insistent ad repetitive they tend to be on influencer page.
The dot you will see represents the number of comments regarding migration issue.
Have a nice view, and if you want to learn more about our research click the following link: